Fitting Into Academia. An Interpretive Approach to the Study of Inequalities in Higher Education

In this conceptual paper, we aim to develop an interpretive research agenda for the study of a higher education institution that is situated in a context marked by distinct social inequalities. The institution of interest operates in a ‘western' tradition of academia and scientific research, but draws many students from non-academic families, with educational biographies in disadvantaged institutions, and/or with an ethnocultural background in which ‘western' academia is not rooted. These students struggle with what could be called a partial ‘misfit' in the academic field. Research that examines situations in which such ‘structural' inequalities are enacted often employs concepts in the tradition of Pierre Bourdieu (habitus, field) and Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (capabilities). To theoretically ground our interpretive research agenda, we intend to tentatively translate the concepts of habitus, field and capabilities to the sociology of knowledge in the tradition of Alfred Schütz, Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger. We aim at developing a conceptual apparatus capable of distinguishing different genres of knowledge that are relevant for a student's (mis)fit in the academic field, with a particular focus on habitualized knowledge and ‘learning' in terms of socialization into academic plausibility and opportunity structures. Moreover, we are interested in what favors or hinders the distribution or development of these specific genres of knowledge and hence influences to a certain degree the above mentioned fit.